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Lea spawned in the level’s default start zone, right next to Randal/AI Joe. “Hello,” she said.

After 4 seconds he replied, “brb.”

She felt a momentary frustration at the delay, but then accepted as a known fact of existence that instincts were often pausing the game or going “away from keyboard” for mysterious reasons. Since he wasn’t ready to talk, she decided to explore this new level.

While this week is all E3 news and its ensuing gaming press hullabaloo, I thought that I’d take a minute to point out a few podcasts that exist outside the standard enthusiast press. While by no means a comprehensive list of some of the good podcasts that are out there, these are a few of the shows that I enjoy listening to regularly that tend to go beyond merely talking about the latest games but, instead, consider games in more depth, from a variety of angles, and usually with an eye towards analysis and critique, rather than mere evaluation. In a word, these are a group of the more thoughtful podcasts out there on gaming.

So, if you’re looking for some smart discussion on video games while you are out and about this summer, these are a few podcasts that you might want to have a listen to.

In my day job I moderate for an online kids’ game. I’ve written about this before, mainly in relation to knowledge toolsets and pedagogy, but if there is one aspect to my work that bears the closest resemblance to Christine Love’s lauded visual novel don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story, it’s the practice of surveillance performed by the novel’s protagonist.

The premise of the game is that in a near-future, net-connected high school, the interpersonal dramas of the students of one homeroom class are laid out bare for their surveying teacher. That teacher, John Rook, has been instructed to follow their public and private conversations for signs of bullying, cheating, and so on.

Games are difficult to begin. I don’t mean that in the ‘sitting down to play’ sense, although depending on how much free time one has on their hands, that may indeed be a problem. Rather, the beginning of a game has to convince the player that it’s worth playing, draw the player into the game’s world, explain the game’s mechanics, and do it all in a way that’s not so slow and plodding that players give up before even getting to the meat of the game. A good example of this problem is in Final Fantasy XIII, which has taken a lot of heat, deservedly so, for taking so long to get to the actual parts of the game which feel like a Final Fantasy game. Games need to fill players in on how to play them, but at some point it becomes tiresome. Not only that, but a constant interruption of instructional windows can break the flow of both gameplay and narrative.

All strategy games are puzzle games at their core. Even if the former are more mechanically complex, you’re still always faced with a specific problem and have to figure out the best solution to overcome it. So it makes sense that both genres would eventually be combined in an explicit way. Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes is hardly the first game to combine blatant puzzles with an overarching strategy, but it takes a very clever approach to the issue. This is a strategy game through and through, but on a very small scale, that’s only possible because the puzzle mechanics replace the large scale elements of most strategy games.